It’s well past midnight, and news of industrialist and philanthropist Ratan Tata’s passing has just come in. Tata, the country’s best-known dog lover, opened his heart and home to stray dogs. He quietly donated to charities and spoke with affection of dogs and those who care for them.
Fifteen hundred kilometres away, Layla is busy sharing images and videos of her dog-feeder community dogs to a WhatsApp group of animal lovers. When she floods this group with messages and photos every other night, she takes care to package her benevolent nature well, but as the messages pile up, at least one member of the group can sense that all is not well on the ground.
Pratikshaji has been quietly feeding dogs for years. She carries several kilos of dog food in a cotton tote bag and after crossing the rather unruly street on which she lives, she vanishes into a small slum settlement to feed an army of dogs. You can set the clock when you spot her slightly hunched back every morning. This is her daily ritual. Like her bath and her puja – that follows the feeding.
It’s rare to see a post by her on this group. She never boasts about how many dogs she feeds daily, how much money she spends on them, or complains about how stressful and hectic her life is. She is a portrait of dignity. Often as she walks into this settlement of construction workers, she learns of new puppies that have been dumped. She welcomes them into her fold and offers them food as well.
She spends an additional hour or two sometimes, pulling out ticks, medicating dogs and coordinating pick-ups for sick dogs who need admission to a medical boarding facility or an animal shelter. Getting admission in a shelter is always a challenge, as they are already packed, short staffed, and grossly underfunded. She does her bit to keep the dog population in check too by regularly sending them to be spayed or neutered.
Yet, the pups keep coming. The construction workers’ children excitedly make sure the newly arrived pups are safe. They get busy shooing away the older dogs, who want to sniff and scare away the new arrivals. The children are used to the constant additions. And Pratikshaji has taught them kindness and empathy by example. Without uttering a word. Without knowing about a humane education curriculum that the US is pursuing, ever since their dog overpopulation crisis was checked, to teach empathy and kindness.
Need for more animal homes?
The number of animal lovers is on the rise and so are animal welfare shelters. However, these rising numbers haven’t addressed Pratiksha-ji’s problems. These fancy dog homes with fancier names are run by diehard, well-meaning, animal-lovers, who want to make a difference, breathe new life into animal welfare. “But have they?” she wonders.
In her heart she knows her challenges are permanent, and the future she envisions for these pups – a safe haven where they won’t get run over, and where they will be fed, loved and cared for, till they are at least a few months old – will not be realised in her lifetime.
But right now her focus is on Diwali. The sound of the bursting of firecrackers, even during daytime, terrifies these little pups and the adult dogs. Over the years she has witnessed behavioural changes in dogs during this period: They go off food, some get fits, some go missing, and some are deliberately targeted for fun. Like the time someone tied firecrackers to a super friendly dog. The dog had to be put to sleep.
She entertains thoughts of dog homes opening their doors to pups, if not adult dogs, to keep them safe at least on Diwali night. Just the doors, minus such frills as food and water. Would her heart have also hardened this way if she had opened a dog home? What triggers this hardening of hearts? Compassion fatigue?
India’s resilient shelter staff
There is very little literature available on the unique challenges faced by animal shelters in India, but most seem to be blindly aping the American template. An interesting study published in Dog-Human Relationships: Behaviour, Physiology, and Well-Being lists the similarities and differences between Indian and Western animal shelters, throwing up data to ask the all-important question: Is it ok “to draw from existing literature on running animal shelters (which) is not locally relevant?”
The study, headlined Similarities and Differences in Challenges and Resiliency Factors Compared to Western Counterparts, was conducted by Deyvika Srinivasa, Rubina Mondal, Kai Alain Von Rentzell and Alexandra Protopopova. The authors, who conducted extensive interviews with Indian shelter staff, managers, caretakers, and paravets, were astounded by the non-existence of country-specific research, and have recommended it strongly to gain a broader understanding of human-animal relationships.
One of the most striking differences between the Indian and Western shelters, according to them, is that the former’s staff is not plagued by “compassion fatigue” – a form of stress resulting from repeated exposure to traumatic situations that can give rise to a range of negative emotions, including anger, annoyance, intolerance, irritability, scepticism and cynicism. Compassion fatigue is consuming both shelter staff as well as veterinarians in the West.
Laura Woodward, who helped set up VSPCA in Visakhapatnam to neuter and spay dogs, has written about compassion fatigue in Mental Wellbeing and Positive Psychology for Veterinary Professionals: A Pre-emptive, Proactive and Solution-based Approach. Nadine Hamilton’s findings in Coping with Stress and Burnout as a Veterinarian are distressing: “The suicide rate for veterinarians is almost four times higher than the general population across the UK, Australia, US, New Zealand and Canada.”
The authors of the India-specific study note that Indian employees do face a continuous loss of animals and the difficulty in processing challenging cases of animal abandonment and abuse: “Despite being exposed to many of these risk factors, (Indian) participants appeared to be highly resilient and did not indicate overt symptoms of compassion fatigue.”
They praise the shelter workers’ ability to forge relationships with both animals and humans, which increases their resilience and is good for mental health. They believe this relationship-centered perspective can be applied to the Western context to help them cope with compassion fatigue.
The Indian Challenge
After speaking to the participants, the researchers concluded that regardless of the many challenges – inadequate funding, community conflict, and high intakes – the staff does not buckle under pressure.
Which possibly means that India has the best animal shelter workers on the ground. They deal with abandoned purebred dogs (even as in the West, owners have the option of surrendering pets) and a huge inflow and low outflow of animals from the shelter, whether abandoned pedigrees or Indies, as the Indian free ranging dogs have come to be known.
They have to also deal with conflicts: Rescuer pressure, resident pushback, and incorrect community care. Yet they have unique coping mechanisms – which the authors recommend should be studied in detail.
They suggest that India should not rely on Western shelter metrics, but should have its own. In fact, they propose that Western shelters should adopt Indian shelter metrics – “as US animal shelters are moving to community-driven sheltering models” while in India, “stray animals are (already) a part of Indian community”.
The biggest headache for any animal shelter is funding. And recent government regulations and cultural preferences for large animals were listed by the shelter staff as the reason for the crunch. Community donations are usually reserved for large animals, depending on their religious importance.
“Interventions to increase donations will require sensitivity given the religious and cultural standing of different species of urban animals, as well as the complex history of human race and ethnicity in India…The relationship between religion, culture, and donations at Indian shelters illustrates another potential divergence from Western counterparts,” they observed.
One of the participants spoke about the new law floated by the Indian government to streamline foreign funding. “That took us a really long time to get all the work done, opening your bank account. So that was again a little painful,” he said.
Reality Check
Which makes one wonder: If there is such an acute fund crunch, is it wise to open more animal welfare homes and then refuse animal intake or take in animals for a specific period – although that stipulated period makes no sense whatsoever. How would a motherless four-week-old pup survive on its own if it is allowed in the shelter for only a couple of weeks? In the best case scenario, the pup gets adopted, the worst case scenario is anybody’s guess.
In which case, isn’t it better to strengthen the existing shelters that have been around for decades, and have an excellent track record, or float a new home, if one must, only if the finances are in order for at least a significant period?
Parikshaji had decided to tick-off the fund-crunched, short-staffed and often unhygienic animal shelters that never had room for yet another dog when new animal homes and boardings started mushrooming. Unfortunately, she hadn’t factored in the gradual crass
commercialisation of these spaces – by the very people who love animals. Even if she had the money to pay to keep her dogs safe in these private spaces, there were some who wouldn’t admit an Indie street dog. There was one right across her housing society. It was backed by a veterinarian no less. She wonders if they would have helped her if they had seen a fat donation coming their way or if she had been a person of privilege they couldn’t have said no to?
Why is it that all people with good intent, with a great track record of animal rescues, lose sight of their purpose when they take this big step? Ironically, they are the ones who wanted to be the harbingers of change, having faced such issues themselves.
Yet Parikshaji will continue to send up a prayer every time she hears of a new animal home opening. For her, that translates as one less dog hater to contend with.
These are issues that will never cross Layla’s mind. In that sense, she sort of complements the new dog home owners – all noise and little substance. Yet, the existence of both cannot be discounted in this dog-hating world. Tata reportedly skipped a meeting at the Buckingham Palace once because his dearest dog was unwell, and the presence of his dog Goa by his coffin melted hearts across the world.
But in this new validation-seeking world of the Laylas, a photo has to be dropped on social media platforms every other day, even it is a little snapshot of being felicitated at a random dog show, to showcase one’s inherent goodness.
We may arguably have the most resilient shelter staff – and the India example, as the authors suggest, could be emulated by the world – yet without the mandatory finances our great potential is being wasted. Everyone is in a fix. The staff at the semi-government funded shelters. The feeders on the ground. The only ones making hay while the sun shines are perhaps the Indian veterinarians, even as their counterparts are depressed or leaving the profession or dying by suicide, as Woodward points out in her book.
The aggressive sterilisation drives notwithstanding, the ideal dog-human ratio is a long way off. Till then the over-stuffed animal shelters will have to somehow accommodate yet another dog, the dog feeders will continue to be targeted by dog-haters, and many more animal homes and dog boardings will spring up with the best of intentions.
As for the pups and dogs on the roads, they will have to just get used to the sound of firecrackers, the fear, the fits and the abuse.
Lamat R Hasan is an independent journalist. She lives in New Delhi.
